He said: “If someone has used a gun and that is all he knows, it is not easy to take this away from him. Training must go on in the villages. In fact everywhere there is a need for training for these young people.”
Militia groups are also responsible for an increase in sexual violence, using the rape of women as a way of demoralising the local people.
Fr Nkunzi said: “For us it’s a kind of new terrorism. It is a strategy for destroying the family. It destroys everyone. It is a kind of ‘killing’.
“Sexual violence causes a big degree of trauma – individual trauma, communal trauma. The perpetrators know that the most effective ways of humiliating a man is to rape his wife.”
In 2007 John Holmes, UN under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said: “The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world. The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”
Yet despite these serious problems Fr Nkunzi said the Church can play a vital role in bringing justice and peace to this war-torn nation: “The church must work to bring our people together and say that another way is possible – and speak out against impunity.”
He continued: “The work of the justice and peace commission is to especially help communities to come together after being torn apart and to support them to bring about change for themselves, their families, their communities."
“It is a ministry as Jesus said to bring peace and reconciliation everywhere.”
He stressed how the church’s social outreach to the communities that have been broken by violence must be rooted in prayer.
Fr Nkunzi said: “Our work wouldn’t be possible without the prayers and the peace that comes from Jesus and God. It is possible because Jesus is beginning the new way and we are following the new way in our country, many persons need to meet him in our country.
“We are all brothers in Africa. We must hear Jesus; we must try to build our region because God has given us a good country.”
He praised ACN for its help in the Congo, saying that the charity had helped many priests, sisters and congregations, who in turn are able to help other people.
He concluded saying: “May God bless all who help you to help us, together we can face many problems in our country.”
